This is a load of pretentious horse**** tbh. The only real athletic or physical gift that batsmen need is hand-eye co-ordination. Fitness is less important in cricket than most popular sports. Plain and simple. This is not arguable.
Define fitness. These are vague words you are throwing around. 'Athleticism' 'Fitness'.
There are different areas of physical prowess you can evaluate - there is cardiovascular endurance, there is explosive strength, there is sustained strength, there is agility, there is range of movement. There are a few more I can't think of right now. My point is, while you don't need to excel in every area of physical ability to be a cricketer, there is a minimum you require in each of them in order to compete at the highest level. And that is just true. If you cannot lift a bat, you can't play cricket as a batsman. You need a degree of strength. If running 10 laps exhausts you, you cannot be a batsman. You need a degree of endurance. If you are so stiff you can't bend your front leg to play a cover drive, you cannot be a batsman. You need a degree of flexibility. You agree with this right?
You need a certain minimum level of physical prowess in different aspects to be an elite batsman at the highest level, correct?
My point is that, when compared to some sports, these minimum requirements will be higher than they are for those other sports. All the examples I gave in that post are true. Do you think I was wrong in any of them?
If you're trying to argue that the sum total of all these physical requirements to be an elite batsman is lower than the sum total of all the requirements to be elite in other sports, then I don't disagree. I just don't know how you can begin to evaluate this, so I don't come out and say I agree either. I think some sports require you to have extremely high capacity in certain areas of physical ability while ignoring all others - like sprinting, for instance. You don't need the stamina to bat for 5 days. It's an apples to orange comparison, so why make it to begin with?
And lets take your stance and test it - that cricket has a lower physical requirement to be an Elite batsman than any other sport. Picture this hypothetical: Take a NFL linebacker, gift him with Inzy's talent, put him in that test against Lahore in May vs NZ, assume all other variables are equal. Do you genuinely believe that his body would be capable of batting 436 balls?
What about if you take a skinny Kenyan marathon runner, give him Inzy's talent, put him in an ODI against Zimbabwe, assume all else equal: is his body capable of hitting 3 sixes and 2 fours in 35 deliveries?
I honestly think the answer is 'no' in both those circumstances.
An athlete's body is built to be used for what they compete in. I don't think you can compare athleticism across sports unless the sports are sufficiently similar enough to be compared. Within a cricketing context, we all know Kohli and Dravid are far fitter than Inzy or Ranatunga. We can make that comparison cleanly. I just don't think you can make a clean comparison between Inzy and an athlete from another sport, unless you define one specific metric (eg. how much can they deadlift, how fast do they run 100m, how fast do they run a marathon). That's a comparison you can make. Just throwing around phrases like 'cricketers are less athletic than other sports' just doesn't work for me.
